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Hey guys, loving Larry's books and will be using Larry's Yii Book tocreate my own portfolio site to see how much time using a PHP frameworksaves. Anyway, in doing my current web project, I decided to use Jqueryinstead of straight Javascript to handle the Ajax and I got to thinking:I love knowing Javascript and the awesome flexibility it gives me, butmore and more, I'm seeing people just using Jquery instead to save time.

Inaddition to the many things I hope to add to my developer toolbelt thisyear(which includes mobile development and even some flash(or it'sequivalent)), I see alot of jobs asking for familiarity with both Jqueryand ASP.net. Jquery I feel I could pick up rather quickly with myhistory with it, combined with my PHP and Javascript knowledge, but ASP Ihave zero experience with. Since Larry hasn't written a book on eithersubject(i.e. I won't be taking money away from him), can you guys pleasegive me your recommendations on good Jquery and ASP.net books sincethere are so many out there(tip, Larry, please write a Jquery, ASP andMobile Dev Book lol)?

P.S. I am posting this here because if you post here, you obviouslylike Larry's teaching style and so your recommendations would be morelikely to fit my own preferred book style. Thanks in advance.

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If you are already familiar with JavaScript and programming in general, I don't think a jQuery book will help you.

You're better to learn jQuery's slightly unique syntax through experimentation and web tutorials, and then start to become familiar with the plethora of jQuery libraries and UIs out there.

Similarly, mobile web development (read: responsive web design) is pretty easy to learn through just web tutorials (there's not a lot to it), so I'm not sure if you'll get a lot out of a book. With that said, I have looked through some of the top-ranked books on Amazon related to mobile web development, and I think any one of them would be sufficient (if you really want a book).

Unfortunately, I cannot comment on a good ASP.NET book. Sorry.

(Again though, since you already know PHP, I imagine that many of the concepts are the same, and just the syntax is different (which you don't really need a book to learn).)

By the way, I'm not hating on using books, but given your current knowledge and what you want to learn, I think free web tutorials and playing around with the code yourself would work best.

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Pro Jquery Mobile is pretty good. I like to get off the computer and read some books occasionally but I agree with HartleySan.

Check out some of the tutorials at Lynda.com - you can get a free week's trial which will give you an indication if its something you want to sign up to. Also check out css-tricks, Chris Coyier has some great tutorials and snippets. His site and forum is a little more focused on front end then back end development but there are alot of smart people there contributing and there is a fair amount of information related to WordPress.

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Good deal guys. I guess it's true. Learning one programing language makes each successive language easier to learn since alot of the concepts are the same, just the syntax is different.

Maybe a better question would be knowing my history, which would suggest would be the most beneficial to my career: ASP, Jquery(more of it anyway), or Responsive Web Design, or maybe a technology I haven't mentioned. I'm not looking for definitive answers, more your thoughts and experiences.

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Play to your strengths. What do you most like to program and what do you think you are best at?

Currently Responsive Web Design is understandably the hot topic and I would certainly recommend understanding what that means and how to achieve it. It surprises me how many Web Design and Digital Marketing Agencies have not updated their own sites to be responsive.

Other recommendations - solid HTML5 and CSS3 skills as they will eventually supercede HTML and CSS; javascript as I think there will always be a demand for good js programmers and a good understanding of Accessiblity as I think that will grow in importance and I think search engines will start rewarding more accessible pages.

On the back end I see more job requirements for php than asp and if that's your strength learn OOP and at least one framework.

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Thanks alot Margaux. Good tips. Lucky enough, all of those are on my to-learn list this year. I'm breaking it down. Instead of learning one at a time, I'm learning asp.net(and C#) today. Tomorrow is client side day, which means learning or expanding in something the client will actually see(JS, Jquery, CSS/3 HTML/5 and yes Responsive Web Design). Third day is my work day, where I actually work on my current project(of course that can be added to other days as well). That's my little roadmap for this year at least( I know you were dying to know)...and let me tell you, if you've never worked with asp.net and Visual Studio Express before, you are in for a bit of a shock.

I love Dreamweaver and am feeling like a total newb right now working without it lol, but i can't wait until I can put asp.net and C# on my resume under skills since it opens up a hole new avenue since alot of corps use asp.net, not php so my options expand. Anyway Thanks alot again guys. I really appreciate it.

Hartley, I took your advice and found a free asp.net online tutorial. It's quite extensive. If Larry doesn't mind, I will post the link here as it assumes you don't know any C#(which I don't) but already, I can understand much of the language I am seeing.

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giantsfan24, thanks for sharing all that. Also, glad you found a good online ASP.NET source for free. Just curious, but what did you mean by the following?

and let me tell you, if you've never worked with asp.net and Visual Studio Express before, you are in for a bit of a shock.

I've heard that ASP.NET is easy to learn if you know PHP, but maybe you've heard/experienced different. Please share your experiences/thoughts. I suppose I should at least dabble in it a bit myself so that I know how to use it, if need be.

To be honest though, I've been focusing a lot on the client-side (read "HTML5 JS APIs") recently. Particularly, I've spent a lot of time learning WebSocket, WebRTC and WebGL inside and out. It's all very cool stuff that will likely be a big part of the future of the web.

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The website is learnasp4.com . The basic course is totally free and other than the computer generated voice(sounds like a very proper English gentleman), it really does a good job of walking thru step by step.

Hartley, I meant that it is just set up very different than Dreamweaver. It almost seams one with the code, rather than as Dreamweaver, that seams like it's allowing you to access your code through it but the program itself is not interfering. It could be that I haven't really gotten into the main C# part of the videos yet and he's just going thru all the stuff Visual Studio can do. I've never taken a formal course in Dreamweaver and after seeing this, perhaps I should.

It is amazing though that I can just about understand all the C# code I've seen so far(simple as it may be). C# seams to be a combination of PHP and JS( a very simple, perhaps naive statement on my part), in that it has event handlers(and other client side code) like JS but is server based(so I would imagine it can do alot of the more indepth server code PHP handles as well). That makes sense as it seems to be a more general language where PHP is geared directly to web based server side code.

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Visual Studio is a really nice IDE. For me, the problem is that it only runs on Windows, which is my main problem with ASP.NET in general. C# is a true OOP implementation of C. As PHP is written in C and JavaScript was influenced by C, it's not surprising that they all seem similar to you.

ASP.NET is technically a framework, meaning it has components built in to make the job easier. A lot of time is spent really learning what components exist, what classes exist, and what methods exist in those classes.

The biggest change (to me) from PHP is that ASP.NET has to be compiled. So you can't just make a simple edit and save it and test it. You have to make your edits, then compile it, then test it.

Also, I generally found that in PHP, the simple things are pretty simple and the hard things are pretty hard. In ASP.NET, the simple things are a bit challenging (because of the compilation and such) and the hard things aren't that hard. Particularly thanks to the wizards available.